Handsomely presented in a linen-slipcased, landscape-format edition, with 116 vividly reproduced color plates on heavy gloss stock, this album collects the important early work of America's great naturalist artist. In 1805, Jean Jacques Audubon was a 20-year-old itinerant Frenchman of ignoble birth and indifferent education who had fled revolutionary violence in Haiti and then France to take refuge in frontier America. Ten years later, John James Audubon was an American citizen, entrepreneur, and family man whose fervent desire to "become acquainted with nature" had led him to reinvent himself as a naturalist and artist whose study of birds would soon earn him international acclaim. The drawings he made during this crucial decade—sold to Audubon's friend and patron Edward Harris to help fund his masterwork The Birds of America, and now held by the Houghton Library and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University—are published together here for the first time in large format and full color. In these portraits of species collected in America and in Europe we see Audubon inventing his ingenious methods of posing and depicting his subjects, and we trace his development into a scientist and an artist who could proudly sign his artworks "drawn from Nature."

"Audubon: Early Drawings sheds insight into Audubon's trajectory as an artist and naturalist.... A wide-eyed belted kingfisher is charming with a disheveled crown of slate blue plumes. Meanwhile, the composition of a Carolina parakeet perched among pecan branches is appealing not only for its organic symmetry but for its value as one of the few visual records of the now-extinct species—a reminder of Audubon's timeless relevance."—Audubon magazine